Blizzard is nerfing Overwatch’s Torbjörn on consoles

It’s been a month since Overwatch’s release now, and the game has already chalked up over 10 million players. While players have gotten, more or less, used to the character roster by now, there was always going to be a balancing problem at some point or the other. McCree and Widowmaker are two of the heroes who’ve already been nerfed, and it seems like the Swedish Torbjorn is next on the list.

The main problem has been Torbjorn’s turrets, which deal an alarming amount of damage with close to zero reaction time and at a surprisingly large radius. Usually, players would require playing as snipers such as Widowmaker and Hanzo, or offense heroes such as Genji and Pharah. However, there’s an imbalance between PC and console players, mainly regarding the issue of accuracy. The argument here is that console players are understandably less accurate than PC players, so it would be difficult taking out Torbjorn’s turrets without them pinging your location and, ultimately, disposing of you.

Director Jeff Kaplan decided to take to Overwatch’s subreddit to give players the news that Torbjorn’s turret damage will be reduced by 30%.

“In an upcoming patch, we will reduce the damage done by Torbjörn’s turret by 30% on Xbox One and PS4. PC will remain unchanged.

ETA – Mid to late July depending on 1st party certification times.”

This is a good time to address the issue, since devs are planning to release their competitive mode around sometime in July, and the beta testing for ranked play is already underway. It seems Blizzard has anticipated that despite giving out permanent bans to rage quitters for the rest of the season, it would be frustrating having to lose out to one of the most overpowered heroes in the game, with an average win rate of 61.6%!